Declan is more wide-eyed than most at this nugget of information. ‘Does that mean it’s compulsory in schools, like? Are you forced to read English Literature?’ he asks, incredulous.
‘No, it’s not forced, but it’s a discipline, a subject offered in universities. You can do a degree in it if you want to. Like Engineering or Maths.’
‘It’s a strange thought, isn’t it, thousands of Indians poring over Shakespeare and Keats,’ Declan says. Now that Ritwik has it pointed out to him by an outsider, it becomes unfamiliar, shifts patterns and configurations, like one of those exercises where he sits in his room and tries to imagine if there could be another him, looking in through a window at himself. What would that other he see? He often wants to look into his own room, locked and empty, from the outside; the bed, the books, the posters, all silent and waiting, as if they had a secret life of their own to which he couldn’t be privy, but living on the second floor put paid to that fantasy.
He knows where Declan’s coming from: how can anyone square a Dr. Johnson reader with images of loin-clothclad, emaciated farmers standing next to equally cadaverous cows? Play ‘The Association Game’ with a white man, say ‘India’, and pat will come the word ‘Poverty’; it’s a coupling branded in the western mind, and who can say it’s wrong? It’s etched in his mind too.
Sarah, sharp as ever, clothes this in other words, ‘So how do you feel about being a post-colonial subject still studying the imperialists’ literature?’
‘Well. .’ he shrugs and hedges the question. ‘It’s not quite like that, is it? Or not always.’
The unasked question is Did you go to an elite expensive school to come this far? He can almost see the unuttered assumptions buzz and collide like bluebottles against window panes: rich kid father must be well-connected or influential you know what they say about rich third-world people when they are wealthy they are wealthier than the extremely rich in the first-world privileged boy to have been bought an education which paved his way here.
But it’s not quite like that, not at all.
In Ritwik’s mind, there were two types of poverty. One, the unexperienced sub-Saharan type, some sort of a shrine for the western media, with images of devouring eyes; fly-encrusted lips of children; women and men and offspring reduced to bare, forked animals, a cage of awkward stubborn bones barely sheathed in polished skin. The other was the slow drip drip drip which did not decimate populations in one fell swoop but hounded you every fraction of your time, got under your skin, into every space in your head and made you a lesser person, an edgy jittery animal because, you see, it never finished you off but gnawed at you here and there just to remind you it was there and that you were powerless in its half-grip. Gloating and victorious, but sleazily so, poverty not as Death triumphant in a Bosch nightmare but instead, one of his low, seedy, taunting thieves.
This was the poverty that played cat and mouse with Ritwik. It ruled in his world of worn-out clothes, of ill-fitting school shoes that ate into his toes but lasted forever with the help of his father’s home repairs, of the tired vegetables sold at cut price when the greengrocers in the daily market were about to pack up and leave for the suburbs, of the hungry delight with which he waited for the treat of gristly and bony meat once in two months or so. It was everywhere, all the time, so much so that Ritwik either did not remember a time when it was not a daily struggle, or his memory did not match his father’s nostalgic stories of days of plenty.
When he was four, his parents and their two sons had moved from their rented ground floor flat in Park Circus to his uncles’ in Jadavpur. He had never been able to figure out the reason for this. In any case, he was too young to remember except for one somewhat unfocused memory of his mother, in one of her moods, shouting at him while dressing him: You’ll get nothing to eat but salt and rice at your uncles’ house, we’ll see then how fussy you can be about food.
Knowledge is a cumulative business, acquired with the slow, unnoticed accretion of information here and there, and when four-year-old Ritwik arrived at his uncles’ home, he had neither the tools nor the pile-up of evidence to comprehend their instant economically downward move in this act which, for him, was full of fun and excitement. The word for ‘uncles’ house’ in Bengali is, after all, synonymous with boundless liberty and fun. Instead, growing up in Jadavpur became a growing intimacy with the shame of his father’s moving in with his in-laws in their home.
A man with a wife and two children was not allowed to do that sort of thing. Whatever a marriage was for a woman, it certainly wasn’t an invitation on the part of her family to her husband to extend the household. It was decreasing the numbers by giving the daughter away. To leave and then return with a retinue was one of those things which was socially forbidden, almost taboo. And to break that tacit rule was to invite the neighbourhood’s tongues and eyes and ears inside the house and give them free play. Which may well have been the case all those years ago but with an important twist: Ritwik’s father was silently expected to provide for everyone already living in the flat in Grange Road — a disabled grandmother, four unemployed uncles, one marriageable aunt — besides his wife and two sons.
Ritwik’s grandfather had died nearly four years ago, having vehemently opposed the marriage of his daughter to a man thirtythree years older than her. He had apparently relented when Ritwik was born and had gone to see his first grandchild in hospital. With his death, the household in Grange Road had lost its breadwinner. He had left no savings, there was nothing in the way of investments, the flat was a rented one and they had fallen behind with the rents and bills for four years. The electricity had been cut off and one of the first things Ritwik’s father did when they moved in was to have it restored.
Since the death of Ritwik’s grandfather, his grandmother and uncles and aunt had lived from hand to mouth, sometimes on the charity of neighbours and distant relatives, at other times on meagre handouts and soft loans begged from people. Ritwik’s father could not have moved in at a more opportune moment. It was an extended family of ten now, living in a three-bedroom flat, with one tiny kitchen, an equally small bathroom, a balcony fronting the street, and a larger room which was really no room, in the true sense, only an open space on to which all the bedrooms opened.
In some ways, there seemed to have been a barter, as tacit as the social rules his father’s move to his in-laws’ home broke. It was an understanding that this shameful thing would be tolerated if he took on the mantle of the chief (it turned out, only) earner. So to atone for the shaming move here his father took upon himself the more respectable and empowering role of head of family: head of family who earned money on which nine other people lived. It was only much later that Ritwik unravelled the killing illogic of someone trying to undo his own weaker position by accepting to be hobbled with leaching burdens: it was the Third World Debt principle. It was submerged blackmail, pure and simple. His father was sixty-one when all this was set in motion.
The continued unemployment of his uncles was a central source of tension in the family. Pradip, the eldest of the four brothers, did have a short-lived job as a bus conductor in a minibus on the Garia to BBD Bagh route but gave it up when his girlfriend at the time complained that this was not a suitably dignified job. ‘It’s a prestige issue,’ she said, using that incontrovertible argument of the Bengalis.
Ritwik’s childhood was signposted mostly by the frictions between his father, resentful of having four young men in their twenties and thirties living off him, and his uncles, who evaded, dodged and hid from his father and from any sense of adult responsibility. Sometimes this erupted into open confrontations, with his father trying to reason with them, or taunt and humiliate them into some sort of contribution to the running of the household. His uncles swallowed everything in guilty silence, and then slunk away, avoiding another run-in with their brother-in-law by returning home well after midnight. Weeks went by in this careful dance of avoidance, with Dida acting as choreographer, warning her sons off if her son-in-law was at home, or carrying news of the dominant mood to them so they could stay away or time their return home. In their absence, Ritwik’s father took out his frustration on his wife with words carefully chosen for maximal damage.